Plea following St Colms polytunnel damage

Staff and service users at St Colms are appealing for the community to help protect their newly recovered polytunnel after it was deliberately damaged a few weekends ago.

St Colms is part of the Council’s All Age Learning Disability Lifestyles services - it provides individuals with tailored employability support, advice, choice and job-coaching to individuals develop individuals work skills, work ethic and opportunities towards paid work. The polytunnel is used to grow vegetables and herbs, planted and tended to by service users - produce is then used in the St Colms Café, also run and staffed by service users.

Ross Groundwater is Manager of the Lifestyles Service- St Colms base: “The service users, volunteers and staff, work exceptionally hard to keep the polytunnel going. We’re using organic gardening methods as much as we possibly can, service users help plan what we are planting and how we’re going to make best use of the produce in our Takeaway Café, alongside other locally sourced ingredients. It’s a vital part of the Employability skills building we do at St Colms and service users are upset, annoyed and confused as to why someone would mindlessly damage it – and we know members of the public who support our café will also be disappointed to hear it’s been targeted. Unfortunately we are now having to invest additional money towards increasing our security measures as advised by the police.

“We had a greenhouse which was repeatedly vandalised and smashed several times a few years ago which we eventually gave up on and we don’t want to see a repeat of that – there is no reason anyone should be on the premises after hours.”

“We’d urge anyone with information to contact the Police who are currently investigating. But we’d also urge people to be vigilant, if they notice any noise or individuals loitering around the outside areas at nights or weekends, to please notify the police immediately."